My tears won’t come. I feel so close to breaking down in tears lately but for some reason I just can’t do it – my eyes remain resolutely dry. Although inside I might be despairing, on the outside there are no cracks in my mask.

Only the people reading this have any idea of the pain I carry inside. I am not able to show it or speak out about it. So I write instead and expose my feelings in this way.

Few of the people I have seen over the past few days will have garnered any hint of my hurt. I have kept it inside. I can still speak to them, laugh along with them, give every appearance of being my usual self while under the surface I am in turmoil. I actively hide it these days.

One if the factors that makes handling it more difficult is that I can’t talk about how I feel to anyone. I don’t mean that there is nobody I feel close enough to; what I mean is that I am literally not able to speak about my feelings. When I am under the added pressure of oral communication the words get stuck in my throat and I can’t get them out – I become mute.

It is not that the words themselves are blocked. Rather it is that I have a flood of words running through my mind but such is the intensity of emotion accompanying them that I involuntarily shut down. I would not even be able to read what I have written out loud.

Tears, words and other demonstrations of my emotions are not something I merely find difficult: they are mentally and physically almost impossible. Instead I am sitting here into the small hours again, writing these words as my way of dealing with my emotional pain. And by expressing my feelings in this way I am better able to cope with them.